The Population in Dhaka City is growing rapidly and increasing the demand for basic urban service delivery including Water Supply. We know the city relies heavily on ground water supply but currently abstraction exceeds substantial yields. Ground Water table levels are steadily failing and increasing numbers of Tube Wells become inoperable. This scenario indicating that ground water mining is taking place this is not sustainable for the future.
To cope with the increasing demand, Dhaka WASA is working to provide improve access to a more reliable and sustainable water supply to Dhaka city dwellers. Dhaka WASA has also an objective to stop the ground water table depletion to maintain environment friendly and pro people water management system to Dhaka city.
As we know these resources are not sufficient in quantity and quality to meet the need of Dhaka WASA’s potential consumers and for the future city. Considering all significant issues; Dhaka WASA is intended to provide an additional 500 MLD water from a new Water treatment Plant (named Gandharbpur Water Treatment Plant).
The objective of the project is to contribute to the environmentally sustainable provision and operations of urban water supply, currently 70% of the supply water is being extracted from ground water resources and the remaining 30% is coming from surface water. Dhaka WASA as well as the government has the intension to decrease the dependency on ground water resources and set out target is to transform the ratio. i.e. 30% on ground water & 70% on surface water supply by 2025.
The project has three outputs: (i) New surface water supply system development (Jointly financed by ADB, AFD and EIB); (ii) Distribution network strengthened and (iii) Project management and administration support.
The project includes the development of a water intake structure (with the provision of future raw water supply to Gandharbpur WTP for phase-2), a raw water transmission pipeline, a water treatment plant (WTP) at Gandharbpur with capacity of 500 million liters per day (MLD), a treated water transmission pipeline to the existing water supply network and primary distribution reinforcements and feeder line of total about 70 km. The project also includes distribution network improvements in MODS Zone-6 area to reduce non-revenue water (NRW). This package is already completed on June, 2021. After the successful completion of this package, in MODS Zone-6 area, now the NRW has possessed single digit figure which was the optimizing of Dhaka WASA.